'Panto' working on transition

The Little Theatre Movement (LTM) has long been associated with the National Pantomime, which opens every year on Boxing Day. And although there is nobody currently working with the company who can lay claim to having been there from day one, there are certainly a few who could claim long-service awards.

“For Kevin Halstead, this is his 21st panto; Faith Bucknor is celebrating 25 years and Ray Jarrett is 18 and counting,” explained Anya Gloudon.

Gloudon is herself a Pantomime veteran, perhaps from birth. Now wearing the cap production coordinator at Little Theatre Movement of Jamaica, Gloudon noted that the team is now working on a transition.

“Miss G is pulling back,” she said of her mother, Barbara Gloudon, a woman whose name is synonymous with the LTM and the National Pantomime. 

But that, she emphasises, doesn't mean throwing out the old guard.

According to the older Gloudon’s biography (Wikipedia), in 1969, 28 years after the first Pantomime was staged in Jamaica, she was invited by Greta Fowler, who with her husband Henry had founded the LTM, to write a script for the annual production. 

Since the Americans had just landed a man on the moon, Gloudon wrote Moonshine Anancy. Selected for production, the piece marked a turning point in the LTM productions, as before Moonshine Anancy, they were more British than Jamaican. The first entry into the annual invited submission contest was followed by more than 30 scripts submitted for the National Pantomime event.

Between 1969 and 2017, Gloudon scripted Pantomime productions such as Reggae Son, Anansi Come Back, Moonsplash,  Schoolers 2, Princess Boonoonoonoos, Runeesha and the Birds, The Upsies and Downsies and Dapper Dan.

This year's production, Ruckshon Junction, is a revamp of Gloudon's 1991 script, Man Deh Yah. 

Over the years, the LTM National Pantomime has become a prime source of material for cultural researchers of one kind or another. Students of all levels – primary through to tertiary – conduct research on the Pantomime exploring this unique take on Jamaican-Caribbean folk roots. There is no recorded equivalent of a similar sustained theatre tradition in the English-speaking Caribbean.